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If we really socialize medicine, it would start at the bottom.
Do you mean a system of government-owned health care facilities and providers such as the VA System?
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Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell
Med students would be subidized, and we would open many new medical schools so we have enough MDs to take care of the population. The primary reason medicine is expensive is that the supply is inadequate. We couldn't provide medical care to everyone if we wanted to.
I'm not a medical professional. However, I've read medical school capacity is only half of the solution: the other half is teaching hospital capacity. Some US medical school students graduate only to find there is no spot in a teaching hospital for them to do their residency. Not many, but some each year.
So I'm with you - I think we need to greatly expand capacity. Afterall, when we implemented Obamacare, there were 25 million-ish people who are newly covered, many of which want to see the doctor. What happens when demand greatly expands overnight and capacity is static? One marvels at our administration that they couldn't answer that question.
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Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell
It should be
Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell
easily possible to provide medical care for everyone while cutting the amount we spend on medicine in half. Every other developed nation in the world does it, there's no reason we can't do it too.
You and I are on the opposite ends of the economic philosophy spectrum. At the same time, I agree with every single word in your conclusion that I emphasized in bold above.
We come at the conclusion from different angles: you from socialization as a way to control costs, and I come at it from the angle that the root cause is entrenched health care bureaucracy which has resulted in a long-term decline in health care productivity.
Yep...Just start telling people not to get old so they die after collecting a few years of SS and only are on the medicare dole for 3-4 years.
I realize you post in jest, but it is a real problem, and one to which I do not know the answer. Some on this thread of thrown up their hands saying "just raise taxes", most of whom clarify it to say "just raise taxes on rich people." That, alone, doesn't seem to be a solution. There just are not enough rich people.
Congress doesn’t agree with you, and it’s not a loophole, shell game, or anything else.
Deducting NOL's against income is one of the best, most rational parts of the IRC. if you’ve missed the explanations in the past, let me know, and I’ll explain it again. But understand, nothing about it is “subsidazation.”
This idea that there are “loopholes” available only to the rich is complete nonsense, and beliveing (and posting) such a thing only serves to let others know how ignorant you are about the topic under discussion. Stop trying to perpetuate such nonsense and you won’t look nearl as silly as you currently do.
Obviously you never met a loophole you didn't like. You chose to gloss over the corporate murders that happen every day. Deepwater Horizon was just a disaster that claimed a lot of lives in one event. Coal mining claims a constant toll of lives, and it apparently doesn't bother you that big money just rolled back mine safety regulations so they could make bigger profits.
There is absolutely no justification for taxing capital gains differently from any other income. Of course, if the basis was just indexed to the CPI, rich folks would have to take the same shaft that John Q. Public has been getting all along. I don't have a problem writing off losses against gains for a limited amount of time, like three years, but letting that run for a decade is just a scam. Our whole system is biased toward invariable positive returns. Sometimes you should lose. Sometimes you should admit you bet on the wrong horse and move on.
Congress wrote the laws that way because, without exception, they are rich people who want to get richer. Greed is a strong motivator. Before long they manage to rationalize their greed as only reasonable.
A lot of the equipment sits idle much of the time. You're paying to maintain availability of equipment and staffing to meet emergencies. The equipment has to be on site 100% of the time. You can outsource staff but you still have to pay a premium for on-call consultations around the clock.
There's a story about Steinmetz* that says it all in this regard. He was asked to find an elusive but crippling problem in a factory full of machinery, so he showed up, spent about a ten minutes examining the setup, then made a chalk X on one machine. "Your fault is there," he said, and left. It was indeed. The next week, the factory owner got a bill for $10,000. "Ten grand? For making one chalk mark! Revise your bill if you want to be paid!" The bill came back: "Making chalk mark: $1. Knowing where to put it: $9,999."
You don't pay for five minutes of the doctor's time. You pay for his 20 years of education and experience.
* C.P. Steinmetz, the real genius of the age and all but forgotten in the glare of the ridiculously deified Tesla.
OMG, just insane that people think this way... 47% pay ZERO income tax, but in your world it is the guy paying 100s of thousand dollars in income taxes that needs to stop being a leach and start being productive???
The reason 47% pay no income tax is that there is no motivation for rich people to create jobs. Does it even sink in that the 47% pay no income tax because after personal and dependent deductions they make less than $10,000 a year? Does it sink in that out of the trillions of dollars of investment money in circulation, the only people it benefits are a small minority, because the money does nothing productive?
Yes -- I agree. Eliminating countless paper pusher jobs would indeed throw the incumbents back into the would-be workforce without real jobs for them. It would cause disruption, but as with all forms of creative destruction, once we come out the other side, life is better.
By the way, China faces the same issue with its steel and aluminum factories - they have way too much capacity, and need to close factories, but they choose not to do so because of the potential unemployment issue. Chinese Economists have, for two decades, argued it is better just to subsidize unemployed directly than for the government to subsidize the factories. Actually, to call them factories is a misnomer - one steel factory employs 500,000 former rural peasants, so the subsidies to keep it open are huge. Instead of calling them factories, it might be more accurate to call them cities.
Subsidizing unemployment has unintended consequences. The US is suffering greatly from the lack of skilled construction workers. They were driven out of the trades during the Bush recession. Not only the skills got rusty, but so did the bodies. The work is physically demanding. It requires a young person to work steadily building both skills and physical endurance to get the job done. Attend any trade show and you will hear a constant refrain that their biggest problem is finding skilled workers. All contractors can do is try to poach workers from the competition, which runs up construction costs. Losing workers in the middle of a project leads to delays. Have you tried to get a contractor to look at a project recently?
In the long run, the US would have been better off subsidizing construction projects than offering extended unemployment benefits. At least we would have bought something with our money rather than just handing it out. The practicality apparently has dawned on the Chinese, but the next recession the US will be right back to handing out extended unemployment benefits.
I realize you post in jest, but it is a real problem, and one to which I do not know the answer. Some on this thread of thrown up their hands saying "just raise taxes", most of whom clarify it to say "just raise taxes on rich people." That, alone, doesn't seem to be a solution. There just are not enough rich people.
So what do we do?
The obvious solution is to broaden the tax base. If the 47% of workers who don't pay income tax got another $50,000 a year in wages, they would be paying taxes and Utopia would arrive. As a side effect, the extra payroll taxes would heal SS and Medicare.
The problem is not that rich people have money, it is that they have become lazy and decadent. If they are forced to go back to being productive, everyone would be better off.
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